What are your thoughts on thorium gas mantles?
Anyway, many decades later I'm still here to tell the story (big bad Thorium hasn't gotten me yet). :-)
Thorium coated gas lamps were similar. The fragile ash is what made the lamp work - it glowed brightly when heated by a gas flame.
But if you touch it, it crumbles to dust. Thorium dust. Ready to breathe in.
Not nice nor recommended—hence my earlier comment about the use of masks whilst cleaning up the remains of broken thoriated tungsten filaments. Of course, a child of five or younger doesn't understand that when he/she sticks a finger on a gas mantle, nor I'd suggest would parents back then.
As a young child, I was lots of trouble, sticking knives and forks into power sockets, eating little bags of washing 'blue' and excreting a blue/green mess for days, eating dog excreta from the street and mother rushing me to hospital out of fright, eating poisoned flowers containing scopolamine and so on, so destroying gas mantles wasn't an unusual occurrence.
Back then, gas lighting was an important backup because there was a great deal of industrial trouble with power station and electricity workers and rolling strikes and blackouts were often a nightly occurrence, they'd occur just at the most inconvenient time of the evening, so gas lighting usage was commonplace. Trouble was I'd somehow climb up on a chair or table and reach up to the gaslight fitting on the wall and touch and break the mantle, knowing I did something wrong I didn't tell my parents. Come the blackout there was no light without a lot of scrambling about with flashlights whilst a new one was fitted.
Another time I recall eating the stigma or stamen of I think a Calla lily and it burned my mouth out, I screamed so loudly in pain my mother came rushing out of the house in a panic. Again, I'd been told previously to keep away from it, but oh no the temptation was just irresistible.
They say modern cleanliness has led to kids having undeveloped immune systems leading to asthma, etc. and my mother kept things spotless but she lost the battle with me. The poor woman had a never-ending job to keep me clean as mud pies, rubbish, junk piles and used and leaking batteries became my favored toys.
By the time I was six I'd grown out of it and was pretty good and actually kept out of trouble until 12 or 13. But old habits die hard and it's a miracle how I survived the next few years. I now shudder whenever I think of the dangerous antics I got up to.
I consider myself a rather timid person when it comes to puting my body in harm's way, in fact I consider myself to be considerably less adventurous than were some of my schoolmates. It's just that sometimes nasty things happened unexpectedly without any intention of me acting in a bravado way or being deliberately adventurous. Nearly electrocuting myself and being paralyzed and unable to move for nearly a half hour, and being trapped on top of a waterfall with a 300/400 foot drop below is simply terrifying to a 13-14 year-old—or at any rate it certainly was so for me. There are other similar instances but I'll not press the point.
Back when I was a kid society wasn't anywhere near as risk averse as it is today. In the 1950s—'60s collective memory of WWII was still raw and vivid with the experience of millions killed—and almost every kid I knew had a father who'd been in the War. Thus when kids got into dangerous scrapes and actually survived there was little or no panic unlike the noise and kerfuffles one sees regularly these days. The attitude was 'you shouldn't have done something that stupid in the first place especially so since you were warned previously against doing it, now you should have learned from the experience'. End of story.
Although the reasons for why weren't often overtly stated, the attitude was 'kid, you've been in a scrape so stop whining about it.' In hindsight, that harshish attitude was not to be unexpected, after all, the kid's troubles usually paled into insignificance when compared with the horrific events that many parents had recently experienced during the War, (such experiences however were rarely discussed with us kids, nevertheless we learned much about the horrors of them through some form of nonverbal osmosis).
Essentially, the attitude was that kids must develop resilience to life's knocks or not survive—and I say that as one who had an overprotective but well-meaning mother who often tried to intervene in what I was doing (that's if she knew about it).
I can't speak for others but I see nothing glorious about my younger days, nor was it anything to be especially proud of; the facts are that it was just the same plain ordinary existence as experienced by many other kids of my age. That said, it was nevertheless a very different and harder existence to that which most kids experience these days. Moreover, it's an experience I'm very glad to have lived through (I'd truly hate to be a kid nowadays).
I am almost certain why people (as you say) reminisce so is because many of us of a certain vintage are horrified at what we see this overly risk averse society has done to lower average resilience of our kids. Frankly, it's been truly alarming to watch the downwards slide.
Heaven help us if Western countries ever got involved in another war à la WWII, we'd be totally stuffed and unable to function let alone able to respond adequately. Given the unfolding tragedy in Ukraine that's not totally out of the bounds of possability. Of course, one hopes that such a horrible calamity never eventuates.
It's clear to me that my parents' generation—that of the Great Depression and WWII—had substantially greater stamina and resilience than my babyboomer generation. As my generation has eventually awoken to and become aware of this fact through observing the same continuing slide downward in latter generations as in their own—and we boomers are in an excellent position to do just that—then it's become clear that as a society we've a problem that we ought to be worried about. To my mind, there's little doubt that those reminiscences are muffled cries for us to do something about the matter before it's too late. (When one sees instances of kids who are too frightened to leave their home then one doesn't have to be told that there's a problem.)
Likely you think I'm overstating my case, perhaps so. But then, whilst my opinion comes from lived experience, it nevertheless counts for little in the wider scheme of things. If you want a greater authority who has carefully researched the matter then I'd refer you to Tom Brokaw and his excellent book on the subject titled The Greatest Generation:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greatest_Generation_(boo...
https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/128...
They have an entire series on gas lighting that's very good. It's an excellent channel, I highly recommend it.